
TS1120 takes home the gold
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It's official! IBM System Storage TS1120 tape drive takes home the gold award, the product of the year, announced by Storage magazine.
I spent 18 hours traveling from Australia to China yesterday, and we were partially delayed due to weather, but felt that it was necessary to discuss the innovative use of encryption on this drive. While most consider the TS1120 an "Enterprise-class" tape technology for the mainframe, it is also attachable to the smallest distributed systems running Windows, Linux, or various flavors of UNIX. Rather than limit users with an Encryption Key Manager that only ran on z/OS, IBM instead chose to implement it in Java, that can be run on anything from z/OS to Linux, Unix and Windows platforms, giving clients choice and flexibility in their deployment. The design is quite clever and elegant. In the encryption world, there are two ways to encrypt.
So, let's say that Green, Inc. wants to send a tape to Blue, Co. Blue has already provided its public "encryption" key to Green, so Green does the following:
If the super-secret private key is ever compromised, all you have to do is mount the tape, unlock the red key with the old private key, and re-lock the red key with a new public key. Since the red key doesn't change, the rest of the data can be left in tact. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes, compared to Sun Microsystems method, which could take 1-2 hours per cartridge, having to decrypt and re-encrypt the entire data stream.
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